Brief requiem for Occupy Los Angeles

[pinboy3niner]

21. That's pretty typical for Venice

The crowd will be fairly decent even without us outlanders.

As far as the scavenging goes, my little brother had an apartment on the Venice Beach boardwalk in the '70s and the same thing was going on then.

That that kind of poverty and desperation exists in the shadow of those multi-million dollar homes is the real offense. I was shocked when I lived in the Washington, D.C. area and saw the poverty that exists in the shadow of the marble edifices of our national government.

I interned on Capitol Hill and walked those halls in my three-piece suit while poor, mostly black families were struggling nearby. And in those days, I volunteered with Mitch Snyder in feeding the homeless in D.C. and tutored war refugee kids from Nicaragua and El Salvador in Northern Virginia.

Occupy won't succeed overnight. But the movement goes on, and I take heart from every foreclosure stopped, every account shifted away from the big banks, every immigrant deportation halted or even just made into a cause célèbre. The main thing is to keep fighting, through the success and the failures--and never give up.